Qualla: San Lucas Island National Park

San Lucas Island National Park: Introduction

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. The graffiti is still there. Fading, peeling, scratched into the walls of cells that once held some of Costa Rica's most dangerous prisoners, it is the handwriting of men who had no other way to leave a mark. For 118 years -- from 1873 to 1991 -- San Lucas Island served as a penal colony in the Gulf of Nicoya, six kilometers off the port city of Puntarenas. Today, howler monkeys call from the trees that have grown up around the abandoned prison buildings, and visitors arrive by boat to walk through a place where suffering has given way to something unexpectedly alive.

Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

San Lucas Island National Park: The Dictator's Prison

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. President Tomas Guardia established the prison on San Lucas in 1873. In an irony that the island's history never quite escapes, Guardia abolished the death penalty a year later -- yet the prison he created became synonymous with cruelty. Prisoners' lives were short, and stories f...

Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

San Lucas Island National Park: Words on the Walls

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. The writer Jose Leon Sanchez spent nineteen years imprisoned on San Lucas. His best-selling novel, La Isla de los Hombres Solos -- The Island of Lonely Men -- drew from those years and brought the island's story to a national audience. Today, visitors can walk through the prison ...

Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

San Lucas Island National Park: Wild Island

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. What drew conservationists to San Lucas was its isolation -- the same quality that made it effective as a prison. Surrounded by the waters of the Gulf of Nicoya, the island's 468 hectares provided natural protection from mainland predators, allowing wildlife to flourish once huma...

Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

San Lucas Island National Park: Nineteen Beaches

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. San Lucas has nineteen small sandy beaches, though most of the shoreline is rocky, with sheer cliffs dropping to the water. A thirty-minute boat ride from Puntarenas -- typically costing eighty to one hundred dollars per person for a guided tour -- brings visitors to an island wi...

Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0